Has anyone ever tried to write a program or controller that would allow LW uses to utilize peer-to-peer technologies? I'm not a programmer so I don't know what difficulties that would entail, but with broadband internet the norm, it seems like it would be feasable, technically anyway.Think of the possibilities. Set up a server, charge users a fair price to join the "club" and boom - Thousands of nodes!!! I'm mean, if Rhspsody can stream high (?) quality audio on demand to thousand of users, cable movies on demand etc., surely the tech and bandwidth is there to make it possible...

Hmmm
B Graves

Weetos

03-29-2006, 12:17 PM

hmmm that sounds cool regarding the number of potential render nodes - a la [email protected], huh?, but this would require your data (scenes,objects,images) to be uploaded to each render node available, and you need to be able to download your frames once rendered... There would be at least two problems : you work could be stolen, and you can't be sure about the render time, because of nodes going offline without finishing what they started to render. [email protected] has to send the same data to several hundreds of workstation in order to be sure the data is gonna be computed and sent back to their servers

I'm not sure this would be, overall, as competitive and efficient as those pay-per-cpu-time render farms...

my two cents

bgraves44

03-29-2006, 03:28 PM

Yeah and plug-ins would be a problem too. Although if you had enough members, perhaps you could "sign-up" nodes for your project based on their "plug-in profile"

what if it worked like this...

1. you upload your project files (scene, objects, images etc) in a standard directory format through a secure ftp upload (or something) to the secure server that would be running the controlller software and have the necessary config files and the node program.

2. The server polls current online members profiles for installations that have the necessary plugins, matched processors etc. and who was "online" to receive projects. (each peer could be using a modified node, loaded form the sever when member went "online", that was written to prevent access during rendering to prevent piracy)

3. Renders would be sent back to the server which would monitor whether each frame was completed and reassign frames from nodes that were dropped. The server would notify the client when rendering was done and he could then download (zipped?) the rendered frames and would have his account charged for the service (which would be nominal, just to maintain the server).